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Number 3


Stephen Hornsby-Smith
Stephen Hornsby-Smith

Wouldn't you prefer to avoid and neglect the decision-making of invidious moral dilemmas? For example, do you invest in keeping 30 traumatised homeless men off the streets and invest in part-time jobs for 5 women living with 3 kids, each in a shelter for women who have been assaulted and domestically abused by former partners? Who can ignore the terrible consequences of deciding who is more worthy? I know, Reader, you already have but explain your decision to those who have lost out! Front-up and take responsibility! That is do you hope to make the right decision or do you pray that somebody else makes that decision fo you? Welcome to the moral turpitude of moral relativism! Can yo sit by and watch division and acrimony when you do not want a certain outcome that is crucially inevitable and unavoidable? What would you do? Do you knock a few political correctnesses together to educate decision makers on a larger scale to upgrade debate and therefore offer the risk of having new ammunition in odd bed-fellow hands, just so that personalities don't debase clear moral differences? Do you acknowledge moralities of your sworn enemies to open up dabate beyond the trivialising of mutual enmity and create new accountabilities? There's no hiding from individual decision-making is there?! Contra hypocresia es todos! But it's a risk. You could lose everything to your opposition?!

Backing out from the comfortable ideological side-lines is the real richman/woman unable to all his/her possessions and follow the truth of the light, even if it's at the end of a dark tunnel? Ideology then speaks for the corrupt who count their 'moral wealth in 30 silver pieces of ideological conviction! Go pay homage to your golden calf and stop hogging your fake moral superiority', your ideological heirs and braces! At this stage I'd refer to the film 'Smart People' but Professor Weatherall drinks oblivion imagining salad days that never really existed. Accept we're all manipulated by bigger players and the only way forward is to attack 'our and their' hypocrisy! Share the guilt of wealthy western society by acknowledging that relative western poverty is not free to be morally superior.

Let me speak to the non-religious here: the philosopher Jesus made the point that unless you give all your existing possessions, the philosophical and ideological, both material and psychological , no one is truly free from both neglect and avoidance of our modern sin. But to humanity he was being compassionate because he knew that he was setting the bar too high for humanity. Why? He was giving us all the moral courage to choose to try and be without sin. 'He who is without sin cast the first stone!' No? He was trying to convey to us that human nature is inevitably morally compromised, but he wasn't just not going to rebuke us for trying to be without sin because he wanted us to forgive each other. He believed the honourable but ultimately morally compromised or deluded. He posited (this for the more Christian religiously inclined) the difference between divinity and humanity vis-a-vis the concept of sin. But whenever 2 or 3 are gathered 'in his name' we're obliged to follow as far as our humanity is capable via the path of his lead. So society isn't just organic, it's a re-affirmation of whenever 2 or 3 are gathered 'in his name', the concept of the family unit, literally or metaphorically, is validated in Jesus' name.

Indeed the ideology of the far left is still demanding a resurgence because it has put 'clear red water' between the end of the Cold War Sovietism in trying to appeal to the romantic forlorn gesture of the quixotic laced with 'cynical in denial' delusions of grandeur by 'look back in anger' squinted by a cocktail of the irrational devised by remedial infantilised objectification of history bending. Why impose a formula of bettering socio-economic forces made macho by coercive enforcing on the round hole by the square peg of the 19th century ideas into the 21st century? These re-emergences of faux Marxism in the labour is just another sub-text of feckless over-simplification of unresolved concealment of irresponsible anti-democracy and anti-capitalism hi-jacking of the 21st century because seasoned with outrage of collective left-wing guilt seasoned with outrage marooned over the skewering of the hard Marxist left of the last 31 years. 'Where were you?' will do it. Perhaps 'one size of political agenda fits all' ideology is no longer a realistic possibility, but even that frailty and human arrogance binds us together in a society of truly acknowledged human imperfection, without ignoring huge wealth differences between the rich and the richless but in a western welfarist re-distributive network that established relative poverty in a Britain no longer the Dickensian Darwinian fate of alienated urban crisis whose longevity is now cast in the 3rd world only. So re-distribution has been massive since 1945 but the richer have grown super-rich to paradoxically divide wealth even further.

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